Men Get Circumcised to Raise HIV Awareness

I don’t know too many adult men willing to volunteer to be circumcised to make a point. But thousands of miles away, male lawmakers in Zimbabwe underwent voluntary circumcision in a new public drive to stem the spread of HIV. HIV affects about one in 10 people in Zimbabwe. These are no lightweights!

A handful of lawmakers stepped into a mobile clinic set up inside the parliament building to undergo the procedure carried out under local anaesthetic and using a new method that does not require downtime.

“I feel proud now that I have accomplished what we set to accomplish,” Blessing Chebundo, a member of parliament from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party, said minutes after he was circumcised. He was the first of a batch of lawmakers that lined up for the procedure.

Speaker of parliament Lovemore Moyo said by going public about their testing and circumcision, the lawmakers were “leading by example”. Indeed, I would have to agree. Forty-four members of parliament have volunteered to be circumcised, in a campaign hoped to reach 1.2 million males by 2015. Population Services International, a US-based global health agency, is offering the testing and circumcision procedures. Medical research has shown male circumcision can reduce chances of HIV transmission by 60%, that’s huge in a nation where 1-in-10 is infected or directly affected.

“If we can circumcise 1.2 million men by 2015 we can prevent 750,000 new cases of HIV, which means we can really start to envision a country in which there are no new HIV infections,” said the health agency’s director Louisa Norman.

HIV is preventable. Outside of sexual abstinence, condom use is the best way to prevent sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Getting tested for HIV helps identify the disease early to prevent transmission to others. Get tested. Get informed.

Zimbabwe has 1.1 million people living with HIV, including 150,000 children, according to the country’s National AIDS Council.